Zoë Kravitz

Caught Stealing

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Hank sitting on the ground alone

Mock-serious bad times in New York City. Scorsese did it memorably in After Hours, and 40 years later Darren Aronofsky has a go with Caught Stealing, a gonzo nightmare missing a certain something. Comedy, I think, or the right comedic tone at any rate. Anyway, on the upside there’s Austin Butler as a dude in the late 1990s who agrees to babysit his neighbour’s cat, not realising that punk Russ (Matt Smith) is on the wrong side of some scary people, who aren’t all that discriminating when it comes to monstering. Russ being away in London at his dad’s funeral, so he says, street hoodlums Pavel (Nikita Kukushkin) and Aleksei (Yuri Kolokolnikov) have … Read more

Blink Twice

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Channing Tatum with Polaroid camera

Men are scumbags and tech bro’s the scumbaggiest of them all. Blink Twice isn’t exactly making the most out-there statement for 2024, but in her directorial debut (she also co-wrote) Zoë Kravitz shows she knows her way around a horror movie, can build mood and tension and get performances out of her stars which are genre-familiar and yet fresh. Kravitz’s current partner, Channing Tatum, is particularly excellent as Slater King, a performative billionaire – think Musk rather than Bezos – who, as the film opens, is apologising with all his heart in an address to the world. He’s sorry for something. Penitent, pleading, he insists he’s learned from whatever he’s done, is now … Read more

Kimi

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Angela at work

When did Zoë Kravitz get so good? In Kimi she’s not only the star of the film but almost the only person in it, and she has a grip like a tractor beam on the attention. It helps that she’s beautiful, of course, but there’s more going on here than that. She plays Angela, a shut-in with a string of emotional conditions, among them germophobia, ADHD, paranoia, neurosis, which suits her job as a human hired to tweak the algorithm of a Siri-like virtual assistant. When someone shouts, “Kimi, you’re a peckerwood,” she’s the one who later adds definitions for “peckerwood” in Kimi’s onboard dictionary – Kimi is always listening. And the covid pandemic, … Read more

The Batman

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Catwoman and Batman

The Batman. Let’s get the plot out of the way first, since it’s the most straightforward aspect of the latest bulletin from Gotham City. A caped crusader, a trio of villains in the shape of Paul Dano’s Riddler, Colin Farrell’s Penguin and John Turturro’s Carmine Falcone, a campaign of murder being waged against city officials. The mayor dies first, in the opening moments of the film, forcing Commissioner Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) to call in Batman – he rates the mysterious vigilante but no one else does. Along the way Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz) becomes involved, a good girl in this version, and a crimefighting sidekick, should Batman want one, which he doesn’t seem to. … Read more